post colonalism 2

さっきの本 postcolonalismで、読み飛ばしたところに面白いのがあったから追加。

イスラム女性のつけるスカーフがイスラムに人々にとっての意味を剥奪され、いかに、西洋人の都合のよい意味を押し付けられているかについての記述。

The ambivalence of the veil

page 80
For European,the veil used to symbolize the erotic mysteries of the east.For Muslims, it signified social status. Today the meaning of the veil has changed dramatically. For many westerners, the veil is symbol of patriarchal Islamic societies in which women are assumed to be oppressed, subordinated, and made invisible. On the other hand, in Islamic societies, and among many Muslim women in non-Islamic society, the veil has come to symbolize a cultural and religious identity, and women have increasingly chosen to cover themselves as a matter of choice.....Depending on who you are the veil symbolizes control or defiance, oppression or autonomy, patriarchy or no-western common value.

イスラムのスカーフはかつては、西洋人にとってはエロティックで神秘的なものの象徴であったが、当時のイスラム圏の人々にとってそれは社会的地位を表象するものであった。今日では、西洋人にとって、それは父権主義的な抑圧の象徴であるが、イスラム圏の多くの人々にとっては、文化的自律性の象徴となった。

page 82
It is constructed for a certain kind of western viewer who already knows from many other representations what an 'Arab woman ought to look like-

当時作成された絵はがきなどは、西洋人がアラブ女性はこうだ、という偏見を満足させるために作成された。

page 83
She seems literally confined, caged exhibiting every quality that many western women and men have considered that Muslim women need freeing from by the enlightened unveiled west....the west considered the wearing of clothes as the mark of civilization, it was 'savages' who went naked.

西欧人にとっては、そのアラブの女性は、西洋人が解放してあげなければ対象であった。

page 89
The veil, in other words, can only be read in terms of its local meaning, which are generated within its own social space. The reading from outside will always tend to impose meanings from the social space of the viewer.

ところが、実際には、その文化的意味合いはそれを産んだ地方でのみ理解できるのであり、部外者が理解しようとするとき、常に自文化の前提からの誤読がある。

page 139
With colonialism, the transformation of an indigenous culture into the subordinate culture of a colonial regime, or the superimposition of the colonial apparatus into which all aspect of the original have to be reconstructed, operate as process of　translational dematerialization. At the same time, though, certain aspects of the indigenous culture may remain untranslatable.

植民地の支配者は植民地を都合のよいように、誤読、誤解して、再構築していった。

　全然翻訳にはなっていないが、そんな感じ。


　で、イスラムの話とばかりいっていられない。

例えば、Japan　Probeで電波塔によじ登った女性のニュースが流れると、
Woman climbs radio tower in Yokohama

Comment by Kenny
2008-08-21 14:44:01
Well, the samurai spirit continues to live on… I wonder if there will ever be a day when the Japanese realize that suicide is not the answer. That’s the only thing that I despise about the Japanese cultur

まあ、サムライ精神がここにありというかんじかね。日本人が自殺は解決策ではない、ということに気づく日がくるのだろうか？そこだけだよ、日本文化で軽蔑してしまうのは

もちろん悪気があって言っているわけではない。しかし、日本人なら「はぁあああ？」という反応だろう。彼らは自分の持っている日本に関する一知半解で、奇っ怪な日本に関する図式で日本の事件・事象をみている。当人に当事者にとって意味などお構いなしにだ。

　様々な英語圏ブログの投稿やコメントにはそんなのに満ちている。

　waiwaiの翻訳ねつ造、あるいは有道ブログの言説も、そうした偏向したディスクールの一部としてみるべきものである。

　そして、もちろん、こうした単純化した図式は日本人が他国をみるときにも注意しなくてはいけない話だ。

　上記引用にある、西洋人の東洋人女性をみる見方も日本女性をみる見方に通じるものがある。日本では女性は抑圧されており、西洋人のぼくらが救ってあげなくてはいけない、といった意識はメディアやコメント欄にかいま見える思想である。もちろん、日本女性が抑圧されていないとは言わないが、多分彼らが思う抑圧され方とはおおいに異なっている。

　東洋西洋という図式だけでなく、例えば、靖国参拝という単純な文化的行事が中国や日本内部のイデオロギーー肯定派、否定派含めてーーーに絡み取られて、様々な意味を押し付けられるときも同じような構図があるのではないか？

　いずれにせよ、進歩主義の一部日本の知識人は海外の思想をコピーして、西洋流の図式を日本にあてはめていい気になっている一方、一部保守は西洋流には揚げ足を取られる格好の餌食になるような言説でしか、反論しない。東洋と西洋ーーーあまりにもおおざっぱだがーーーのはざまにあるとういことが、しかし、日本のジレンマであり、可能性なのかもしれない。


更新

なお、Books in Review

The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
もこの関連でおもしろい。

Redrawing the geographical map along cultural lines, Huntington identifies eight distinctive civilizations: Islamic, Sinic (centered on the "core state" of China), Western (with the United States as its core), Orthodox (with Russia as its core), Japanese, Hindu, Latin American, and (somewhat tentatively) African. Geopolitically, the latter two count for little. Each of the others is likely to have an important role in the forthcoming struggle, but Islam, the West, and China constitute a tier apart, with the "most dangerous clashes of the future . . . likely to arise from the interaction of Western arrogance, Islamic intolerance, and Sinic assertiveness." Or to portray the contending forces more starkly still: "The dominant division is between the West and the rest."

Indeed, it is the West’s penchant for meddling, in Huntington’s view, that will make the age of civilizations so perilous. Western insistence that its own values provide the model to which other civilizations must adhere virtually guarantees discord. "What is universalism to the West," he notes, "is imperialism to the rest."

Making this intrusiveness more problematic still is the growing mismatch between the West’s aspirations and its capacity to enforce them. "The West won the world," Huntington observes, "not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion . . . but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence." Now, according to Huntington, the power of the West relative to that of other civilizations has begun to ebb, most notably in comparison to Islam and China. In the Islamic world, massive population growth breeds restlessness and resentment―and produces cohorts of easily mobilized fighters eager to repay the West for slights real and imagined. In China proper and throughout the Sinic world, skyrocketing economic growth translates into military potential that threatens the long-standing dominance of Western arms. The United States and the traditional European powers meanwhile remain willfully oblivious to "the discordance between the West’s―particularly America’s―efforts to promote a universal Western culture and its declining ability to do so."

Huntington is properly wary of the new economic giant that he labels "Greater China and its Co-Prosperity Sphere." In Huntington’s view, China’s emergence as East Asian hegemon is all but inevitable. For the West, the better part of wisdom is to accommodate itself, however reluctantly, to that prospect.

When it comes to Islam, however, Huntington appears less sanguine. The prospects for accommodation are not promising. "The twentieth-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism," he observes at one point, "is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity." As civilizations, Islam and the West―the one with its jihads, the other given to crusades―seem peculiarly well-suited to be at each other’s throat.

Huntington does not attribute the West’s recent difficulties with Islam to the influence of a handful of fanatics. "The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power." Given this combination of qualities, Islam finds it difficult to live in harmony with its neighbors. In the famous Foreign Affairs article ("The Clash of Civilizations?" Summer 1993) that was the genesis of this book, Huntington stated categorically that "Islam has bloody borders." And he bluntly refuses to soften that assertion now. In short, Huntington’s dread of Islam comes at times precariously close to unbridled antipathy.

All of this, in Huntington’s estimation, does not point inevitably to a cataclysmic intercivilizational spasm of self-destruction―although such an outcome is within the realm of possibility. It does, however, point to a new era of competition, friction, and contentiousness. At times, the competition will manifest itself in armed conflict. When actual fighting does break out, it will produce bitter, protracted, off-again-on-again violence that will smolder intermittently along the boundaries adjoining rival civilizations. In this regard, Huntington points to Bosnia as the grim prototype for "fault line" wars to come.